A wealthy young Canadian woman becomes mentally unstable as her marriage to a Parisian man begins to flounder. She has suffered at the hands of a domineering mother; her first marriage, a happy one, came to an end after a freak accident, and she struggled to fit in with the intellectuals and opportunists in her milieu. Gallant writes from inside the mind of the heroine, revealing an honesty that can’t be found in the “sane” characters around her.